Michael McNamara

technology, networking, virtualization and IP telephony

E-Metrotel UCx-50 Unified Communications Solution

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Logo_EmetroTel_MainOver two years ago I started hearing about a company called E-Metrotel that was based in Texas and was working on an IP based Unified Communications solution that could interoperate with SIP phones from manufacturers such as Aastra, Avaya, Cisco and Polycom among many others. Supporting multiple SIP handsets wasn’t revolutionary in the least so why the excitement?

Why the excitement?

E-Metrotel claimed they could support legacy Avaya (formerly Nortel) UNIStim IP phones as well as legacy Norstar digital phones. That statement quickly grabbed my attention knowing that the Norstar is probably the widest deployed small office key system in the United States. I actually still support 5 Norstars in my network because we haven’t found a cost effective replacement for them and in short they just plain work.

I was able to open dialog with Jay and Chris from E-Metrotel who graciously sent me an evaluation UCx50 unit for testing.

UCx-50Demo Unit

The configuration of the UCx50 was fairly simple and straight forward. It comes out of the box with a default IP address which you can connect to and quickly reconfigure to match your IP addressing scheme. I was quickly able to configure and add 2 SIP extensions for which I used 2 Avaya 1220 IP phones which were running SIP firmware. With that success under my belt I proceeded to attach 2 Avaya i2002 IP phones which were running UNIStim. When configuring the extensions for the UNIStim handsets I selected “Generic Nortel Device” and provided the MAC address of each IP phone. With that all done I quickly had all 4 IP phones working and was placing calls between them without issue so I decided to push the envelope. I setup a digital gateway using the hardware from an BCM/SRG along with a IDE flash drive provided by E-Metrotel. This required me to physically remove the internal hard drive from the BCM/SRG hardware and replace it with an IDE flash drive which was pre-loaded with software by E-Metrotel. As with the UCX-50 itself it was pretty simple to configure the digital gateway and get it up and running. I did spend some time trying to figure out how the digital gateway mapped the 25 pair block I had the Norstar digital phones connected to. Eventually I had calls flowing between the 2 Norstar M7310 phones and ultimately between all the digital and IP phones.

Hardware

The original hardware I tested utilized a Zotac small form factor desktop computer with;

  • Intel Atom CPU D525 @ 1.80Ghz
  • 2 Gb RAM
  • 220 Gb Disk Space
  • Ethernet 10/100Mbps

Since that time E-Metrotel has refreshed the hardware  to include the following;

  • Intel DN2800MTUCX50E_cleaned
  • 2GB RAM
  • 64Gb SSD Hard Drive
  • 6 USB 2.0 ports
  • Ethernet LAN 10/100/1000 Mbps
  • PCI-e V2.0 Expansion Slot (T1/E1 PRI trunk card)

There are a number of models available depending on the number of IP phones you are looking to support.

  •  UCx50E – 80 extensions can be enabled, supports 80 concurrent calls
  •  UCx450 – 450 extensions can be enabled, supports 225 concurrent calls
  •  UCx1000 – 1000 extensions can be enabled, supports 500 concurrent calls, (redundant power supplies, network i/f’s and Raid 6 Hard drives)
  • UCx000 – 2000 extensions can be enabled, supports 800 concurrent calls and up to 15 UCX virtual machines (dual CPU, redundant power supplies, network i/f’s and Raid 6 Hard drives)

The introduction of the UCx2000 is more for service providers looking to support multiple customers on a single piece of hardware.

Dashboard

E-Metrotel-UCx2Software

The UCx50 is based on CentOS Linux 5.9 running Asterisk v1.8 along with FreePBX.

Features

The UCx50 supports the following features;

  • SIP Trunks
  • SIP Phones/Clients
  • Nortel IP and Digital Phones
  • Voicemail/Unified Messaging
  • Integrated CDR
  • Meet Me Conferencing
  • Call Recording
  • Call Centre & IVR
  • Find Me / Follow me
  • Full suite business features

The UCX-50 even supports Shared Call Appearances (SCA) which has been a challenge for sometime with Asterisk based solutions. Unfortunately I didn’t have the time to test that feature.

Questions / Interview

Q. Why did you chose Asterisk?
A. We choose Asterisk because it was deemed a mature and robust software structure, it has 95%+ of the features that businesses are looking for and it has thousands of customer installations across every industry segment. Also it already has a vibrant eco-system of active sales/service companies, of contributing code developer/bug fixers and a large and growing number of application/solution providers for almost any business requirement.

Q. Does E-MetroTel contribute back to the Asterisk codebase?
A. Yes, in the past we contributed fixes back to the Asterisk project.  Our product is currently based on the Asterisk version 1.8, which is a LTS release in the maintenance mode – due to that, only important security fixes are accepted for the 1.8 stream.   We are looking into switching to Asterisk 11 in the near future.  Once we complete this task, we’ll have several enhancements that we are planning to contribute to the Asterisk 11/12 stream.

Q. It appears that E-MetroTel is using Elastix/FreePBX for the GUI?
A. Yes. One of the best values in going with an open source platform is that you abandon the NIH mentality and you have a wide variety of options to choose from when you are looking for a particular feature or option. For our management GUI we choose the Elastix/FreePBX as a core starting framework.

Q. Does E-Metrotel contribute back to the Elastix / FreePBX codebase?
A. Our product is currently based on the FreePBX version 2.8 (the same version that is used by Elastix).  This FreePBX version is no longer maintained by the open source community – hence no changes can be contributed.  We have the change to a newer version of FreePBX on our roadmap.  We should be in a position to contribute to the FreePBX open source project once we complete the transition to the latest FreePBX version. We have been contributing fixes to the Elastix open source project.

Q. How is the product licensed beyond the purchase of the base unit?
A. We license in a per extension basis. Extensions can be purchased in blocks of 1, 5, 20 and 50.

Q. How can users find a reseller?
A. By directing such a query to E-MetroTel via our web form, via email (info@emetrotel.com) or calling us at  214-556-5917 .

Q. Have you tested your solution with any SIP based providers? Verizon, XO, AT&T, Nextiva?
A. At this time, we have seven SIP trunk providers listed in our GUI pull-down menu with VoIP providers.  We typically add a new provider to this list whenever we determine that a larger number of customers uses or is planning to use a provider that we haven’t included yet (we register an account with that provider, perform validation testing to determine the proper configuration and then add the provider to the list).

Q. Any recommended SIP providers?
A. We like voip.ms for their QOS and pricing model.

Q. Is there any remote support built into the product?
A. Yes. We provide a built-in VPN and we host a service out of our Plano office which our partners can use to get secure remote access for monitoring and provisioning services. It’s a free service for our gold level partners.  One of the great thing about having such a network-centric product is the ability to leverage all the internet-based desktop sharing apps, or our remote support built-in VPN, for remote troubleshooting and support. All of our products come with 1-year support and warranty included.

My Thoughts

If you are a legacy Nortel customer then the UCx solution could potentially help you migrate to an IP based solution while maintaining your older digital phones or legacy UNIStim IP phones. When upgrading from a legacy key system a large portion of the cost is handsets so this solution could potentially save businesses a lot of money. More importantly it provides the ability to migrate overtime to an all IP solution without the need to forklift the entire telephony environment overnight.

If you are at all interested I would suggest you hit up the folks at @E_Metrotel for more information.

Cheers!

It’s the networks fault #1

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network_cable_by_tootallAs you may have noticed I’ve been extremely busy lately both with work and with my personal life. I thought I’d start a series of news or tidbit posts – the topics usually don’t deserve a post on their own but they are topics that I’d like to comment about or solicit feedback about. A simple name would have been Items of Interest or something along those lines. However, that’s just too boring for me and since I heard the phrase “It’s the networks fault” three different times today I thought what a great name. So the name of these posts won’t have anything to-do with the actual topics… which is the same relationship the network actually had to the three problems I heard about this morning, perfect irony if you ask me. You can join me on twitter.. hash tag #ITNF

We have a winner! – Avaya Sweepstakes

We had a pretty good response to the sweepstakes we ran over on the discussion forums last month. In the end Hugo from Quebec Canada was our lucky winner. Thanks to everyone for participating and congratulations to Hugo, we hope you enjoy the iPad2 WiFi+3G! Thanks to Avaya for (unofficially) sponsoring this event. It’s exciting to see that there are folks within Avaya that are still very passionate about their products and willing to step up and support both the products and their customers.

Avaya’s New Look

As you may of may not have noticed by now there’s a new look over at the Avaya website and the support website. I’m pretty impressed with the short time I’ve already spent on the support site. The search function is refreshingly quick and fairly thorough. It’s easy to quickly find the product your looking for by browsing through the “Products” menu so by just searching for it.

Unfortunately it looks like they used different field names for the user login, so Firefox couldn’t fill in the field. :(

I generally like it… what do you think?

If your a member of the discussion forums head on over and post your thoughts in this thread. If your not a member why not register, it’s free!

UNIStim Software Release 5.4 for IP Deskphones

Avaya has released UNIStim firmware 5.4 for their IP deskphones;

  • 0621C8L for the 2007 IP deskphone
  • 0623C8L, 0624C8L, 0625C8L, 0627C8L, 0626C8L for the 1110, 1120E, 1140E, 1150E and 1165E IP deskphones
  • 062AC8L for the 1200 series IP deskphones

As always I recommend you review the release notes for all the details.

The following fixes are included in this release;

  • wi00966639 External – Intermittent issue where the 1100 Series IP Deskphones fail to open socket resulting in no speech path.
  • wi00926866 External – PC authentication with 802.1x (EAPOL) does not work if IP Deskphone re-registers to TPS after a Network failure.
  • wi00960325 External – LLDP Time to Live expiration – an error message is displayed, but pressing any key enables the set to work as expected. (SR# 1-2340185912)

I know I’ve personally observed the “LLDP TTL Expired” message on my IP phones and I recall quite a few comments from a number of readers.

Cheers!

Asterisk Now with Avaya IP Phones

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There’s been a lot of discussion lately around connecting Avaya (legacy Nortel) IP phones with third-party SIP capable call servers. I’ve personally toyed with Asterisk on a number of occasions and have always been impressed so I recently setup an Asterisk Now installation (AsteriskNOW-1.7.1-i386.iso) on a CentOS 6.2 KVM host so I could re-test the interoperability between the latest version of Asterisk (v1.6.2.20) and the 1100 and 1200 series IP phones from Avaya running SIP v4.0 and SIP v4.3 respectively.

The installation was pretty straight forward, however, there were a few small issues that I had to deal with. Initially I was unable to connect to the server and found that the firewall was enabled, so I had to disable the firewall with the following commands, service iptables stop, chkconfig iptables off. I was also getting a weird error in the FreePBX gui when I tried to apply the configuration;

exit: 126
sh: /var/lib/asterisk/bin/retrieve_conf: Permission denied

…this turned out to be an issue with SELINUX, so I had to edit /etc/selinux/config and disable SELINUX (a reboot is required for the change to take effect). Once I did those few steps I was ready to create some extensions so I created 1001 and 1002 and set their password (secret) to ‘abc123’.

The Avaya (legacy Nortel) IP phones can be provisioned from a TFTP server so I installed a TFTP server on my Asterisk server using yum install tftp-server. Then I enabled the TFTP server with chkconfig tftp on and finally I had to restart xinetd with service xinetd restart. I placed the files I needed in the /tftpboot directory including 1220SIP.cfg, 1120eSIP.cfg and users.dat (these filenames are case sensitive on a Linux server – if you use a Windows server such as TFTPD32 then the case is not an issue). I configured my local DHCP server to offer DHCP option 66 (TFTP Server) and I was off and running. The 1220 and 1120e both booted, download the provisioning files from the TFTP server, and connected to the Asterisk server. I entered the username and passwords and I was logged in and running in seconds placing calls between the two handsets.

I had to refer to my original post on the forums on what settings I needed to disable the extended license;

http://forums.networkinfrastructure.info/nortel-ip-telephony/disabling-features-from-extended-feature-set-on-ip-deskphone/

Here’s what the configuration files on the TFTP server looked liked, the 1220SIP.cfg file contained the following lines;

[FW]
DOWNLOAD_MODE AUTO
VERSION SIP12x004.03.09.00
FILENAME SIP12x004.03.09.00.bin
PROTOCOL TFTP

[DEVICE_CONFIG]
DOWNLOAD_MODE FORCED
VERSION 000200
FILENAME users.dat

[DIALING_PLAN]

The 1120eSIP.cfg file contained the following lines;

[FW]
DOWNLOAD_MODE AUTO
VERSION SIP1120e04.00.04.00
FILENAME SIP1120e04.00.04.00.bin
PROTOCOL TFTP

[DEVICE_CONFIG]
DOWNLOAD_MODE FORCED
VERSION 000200
FILENAME users.dat

[DIALING_PLAN]

The users.dat file contained the following lines;

DNS_DOMAIN local
SIP_DOMAIN1 asterisk.local
SERVER_IP1_1 192.168.1.10
SERVER_PORT1_1 5060
SERVER_RETRIES1 3

VMAIL 5000
VMAIL_DELAY 300

DEF_LANG English
DEF_AUDIO_QUALITY High

ADMIN_PASSWORD 26567*738
SSH YES
SSHID admin
SSHPWD admin
# Settings to disable extended license
MAX_LOGINS 1
USB_HEADSET LOCK
EXP_MODULE_ENABLE NO
ENABLE_SERVICE_PACKAGE NO
IM_MODE DISABLED
AVAYA_AUTOMATIC_QoS NO
VQMON_PUBLISH NO
SIP_TLS_PORT 0
ENABLE_BT NO

I did have to re-configured the 1220 to AllAut before it would honor the settings in the TFTP provisioning file.

Cheers!

SIP Software Release 4.3 for 1100/1200 Series IP Phones

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Avaya has released SIP software release 4.3 for their 1100 and 1200 series IP deskphones.

This software release is compatible with the following Call Server platforms;

  • Avaya IP Office R8.0 (1220, 1230, 1120E, 1140E IP Deskphones only)
  • Avaya CS1000 R7.0 and 7.5
  • Avaya CS2100 SE13
  • Avaya Aura® Communications Manager 6.0
  • Avaya Aura® Session Manager 6.0

I’ll refer you to the release notes for all the details.

Cheers!

UNIStim Firmware Release 5.3 for IP Deskphones

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Avaya has released UNIStim firmware 5.3 for their IP deskphones;

  • 0621C8J for the 2007 IP deskphone
  • 0623C8J, 0624C8J, 0625C8J, 0627C8J, 0626C8J for the 1110, 1120E, 1140E, 1150E and 1165E IP deskphones
  • 062AC8J for the 1200 series IP deskphones

As always I recommend you review the release notes for all the details.

This release includes the following enhancements;

  • LLDP Advertisement on PC port
  • Support for new audio profile configuration option through Zero Touch Provisioning to support Australian/New Zealand S004 audio standard (applies to 1165E only)
  • Support for BCM to IP Office migrations to upgrade IP Deskphones from UNIStim to SIP (1120E, 1140E, 1220, 1230 IP Deskphones only)

I noticed the following warning concerning Avaya’s (formerly Nortel) Contact Recording and Quality Monitoring (CRQM) if you are using Secure Calling;

IMPORTANT NOTE: If a customer is using secure call recording with Avaya Call Recorder (ACR) then they should not upgrade to UNIStim 5.3 until an ACR patch (101055) is available and the functionality is enabled by updating a specific entry in the ACR 10.1 properties file. Note the 101055 patch for ACR10.1 is Generally Available, however, the default operation with this patch applied is to NOT enable the new functionality. Therefore if a customer site is using UNIStim 5.3 and secure call recording, then a specific entry needs to be added into the ACR 10.1 properties file which enables the new functionality. The specific string that needs to be entered will be published once system level regression testing is completed, expected later this month. At that time, this Product Bulletin will be updated.

Cheers!

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